Jobs: Apple is a “Client Company”

Apple Computer, Inc. interim CEO Steve Jobs said his company’s presence on the Internet should not be underestimated.


Speaking to a group of desktop publishing industry executives at the
Seybold Seminars in New York City, Jobs maintained that a disproportionate number of people using the Internet work from Macintoshes.


“On the server side, it’s true, more people are using NT rather than the
Mac. Apple is not in the server business today,” he said during a
question-and-answer session following his keynote speech at the Javits
Convention Center.


Saying that Apple is a “client company,” Jobs said Netscape reports that 25
percent of the visitors to its site are Mac users.


“We all know that Apple’s marketshare is lower than 25 percent. On the
client side, a disproportionately higher number of people are using the
Internet than on the Windows side.”


Jobs spent the keynote outlining Apple’s latest software and hardware
products, including QuickTime 3 file format, ColorSync, a color management software, and the Power PC G3.


Jobs said QuickTime 3 provides the opportunity to offer common ground for
digital media in the same way that PostScript did for applications and the
printer.


“Before PostScript, every application needed to know about every
printer,” he said. Jobs pointed out that digital media–including the
Internet, digital conferencing, CD-ROMS, and video editing–now all have
different standards.


“QuickTime provides a ton of functionality for the app developer, but it
also completely isolates you from all of these formats,” he said. “If you
are going to say it in a formal way, it’s a unifying format and platform
for multi-source and multi-destination content creation and consumption in
digital media.”


Last month, the QuickTime format received a boost when the International
Standards Organization selected the format as the foundation for a new
multimedia standard, MPEG-4.


Jobs was also asked about the status of Rhapsody, which he hadn’t mentioned
during the speech. Rhapsody, Apple’s long-awaited new operating system, is
designed to better handle TCP/IP traffic than the current Mac OS.


Jobs said there will be more information about Rhapsody during an Apple
software developers’ conference planned for May. He declined to provide
further details.

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